Friday, June 6, 2014

IBM MegaRAID BIOS Config Utility RAID-10 Configuration

So, a lot of people have difficulties configuring RAID-10 using
MegaRAID because if you have for example four hard disks and you add
them to a Disk Group, the only available options are RAID-0 and RAID-1.
Here is how to do this on an IBM System x3650 server with four 300GB SAS hard disks.

During the system boot you will be given the following options.

You will select the “Diagnostics” (in this case using F2 key) and when
MegaRAID is loaded you can use “Ctrl+H” key combination to enter the
WebBIOS configuration utility.

From the above capture you can also see that there is no virtual disk configured and the controller detected four JBOD disks.
When you enter the utility, you will have the ability to select the
adapter you want to configure. In our case we only have one adapter so
it is very straightforward.

Next, we have the MegaRAID BIOS configuration main menu for the selected adapter.

From the main menu you select option “Configuration Wizard” and you will get the following screen.

From the above configuration types, we select “New Configuration” since
there is no prior configuration. This can also be used if you want to
replace the existing configuration with a new one. Before proceeding you
will get a warning that this selection will erase the current
configuration as shown below.

Next, you select the hard disk drives you want to add to the RAID array.
To select more than one press CTRL key. In our case all four disks will
be selected in order to implement the RAID-10 level.

In the next window you will have to select “Manual Configuration” if you want to create a RAID-10 array.

Below you select (once again using CTRL key) the first two disks and
click “Add To Array” in order to add them to the “Drive Group0″ on the
right side panel.

After adding the first two disks you click on “Accept DG” to complete the setup of this drive group and create a new one.

Follow the same procedure and add the other two disks to the new drive group and then click “Accept DG” and “Next” to continue.

You add the two newly created arrays to a span by selecting each one of them and then clicking on “Add to SPAN”.

And as you can see below, the selected RAID level is 10. Here you can
tune your RAID-10 configuration and when you are ready you click on
“Update Size” and then “Accept” button.

Finally, you can continue by hitting “Next” and after the usual warning
messages and final review of the configration, the RAID will start
initializing.

On the bottom right you have some additional options that you can use
but in any case, when the initialization process is completed the
RAID-10 virtual disk will be ready to use.